Corentin Marillier (*1991) is a percussionist, performer and composer whose musical universe lies at the crossroads of experimental and traditional music.
Co-founder and artistic advisor to the Soundtrieb and Semblance ensembles, his work explores the cross-disciplinary links between music, performance and installation, and is oriented towards a post-instrumental practice combining both sound and visual elements. Working to decompartmentalize practices and aesthetics, he encourages both contemporary classical music and experimental currents, notably through a series of interviews with young artists that he regularly publishes under the name Conversations.
He has collaborated (among others) with Simon Steen-Andersen, Cathy van Eck, Nicolas Frize, Bastien David, Jérôme Combier and Raphaël Cendo, and works with IRCAM, the Fondation Royaumont and the Philharmonie de Paris on artistic and educational projects.
In February 2023, he was appointed co-artistic director of the collective Eklekto collective in Geneva.
Constantly engaged in creation, Eklekto collaborates with composers and contemporary artists to present projects that reinvent percussion and the listener's expectations.
Founded under the visionary impetus of percussionist Pierre Métral in 1974, this variable-scale ensemble today works with over 20 percussionists from the Lake Geneva region.
In addition to its concert season in Geneva and a biennial event organized from 2006 to 2014, the collective is a regular guest on international stages such as Kyoto Experiment, Wittener Tage für Neue Musik, Amsterdam Muziekgebouw, Biennale de Venise, Romaeuropa and Barbican Center. Recently, Eklekto has collaborated with artists such as Ryoji Ikeda, Thomas Meadowcroft, Tristan Perich and Justina Repeckaite. These projects question both the traditional concert format and the evolution of an instrumentarium in constant transformation.
THE PROJECT
Thinking and reflecting on one's practice is stimulating and necessary, but can also be disconcerting, especially when one is constantly confronted with something new. Percussion is in a class of its own in the instrumental landscape, so much so that it has been renewed over the centuries, and saw an initial explosion in its use by avant-garde composers. Today, technology and a form of modernism have once again profoundly altered our practice. Venturing into new practices, playing on instruments or objects as much as performing a text or movements, the percussionist has considerably broadened his field of performance. As a keen observer of his own practice and a player in this transformation, percussionist Håkon Stene was the first to use the term "post-instrumental" to describe this emerging practice. Over the past five years, I've been involved in a wide spectrum of these different practices, regularly moving from the role of performer to instrumentalist and sometimes composer. Drawing on recent repertoire and collaborations with different composers, my work seeks to explore new instrumental possibilities involving sound, object manipulation and visuals. I sometimes use hybrid instruments equipped with transducers, loudspeakers, microswitches or other devices, as well as mechanical objects such as record players, vibrators or even fans. What lies behind this research is the sheer pleasure of discovery, that of a "new" sound, accidentally obtained, which we then seek to tame and combine with all those that are already with us.